Sample Adaptive Offset Filter Hardware Design for HEVC Encoder

This work presents a hardware design for the Sample Adaptive Offset filter, which is an innovation brought by the new video coding standard HEVC. The architectures focus on the encoder side and include both classification methods used in SAO, the Band Offset and Edge Offset, and also the statistical calculations for the offset generation. The proposed architectures feature two sample buffers, classification units for both SAO types and the statistical collection unit. The architectures were described in VHDL and synthesized to an Altera Stratix V FPGA. The synthesis results show that the proposed architectures achieve 364MHz and are capable to process 44 QFHD (3840x2160) frames per second using 8,040 ALUTs of the target device hardware resources.